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Everyone and their grandfather (and dog) seems to have a website these days. The Web is getting more crowded by the day, with literally dozens of websites being added as you read this article. It is becoming harder and harder to get noticed among the masses.

“Fortunately” for us designers, not everyone seems to understand what makes or breaks a Web design. Granted, Web design is to a large extent a creative process and can therefore be called more art than science. But because it is intrinsically a medium of presentation, some rules (or at least principles) apply. By following some simple pointers, anyone should be able to create a visually pleasing design and take one step closer to fame. Okay, it’s not that simple, and talent and experience do matter, but anyone can turn their home page into something prettier within mere minutes.

So what makes something pretty? It is not Flash. Not to say that Flash has no merit, but Flash alone doesn’t make a design good; some nasty Flash websites are out there. Also, one doesn’t have to be a great illustrator to make appealing designs. Instead, look at Web design as a symbiosis of different elements. No single element counts the most; rather, the sum of the elements makes a design look good.

These elements are the 7 key principles that make a Web design look good:

Balance,

Grid,

Color,

Graphics,

Typography,

White space,

Connection.

1. Balance

Balance is all about ensuring that your design does not tip to one side or the other. It is like the balance of weight in achieving symmetry or asymmetry.

Example

Look at the dog in the header graphic of Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction website below. I took this example from The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird. Jason points out how the cross to the right makes up for the added visual weight that the dog provides on the left. It is a small but not insignificant detail. See for yourself by hiding the cross with your hand.

This is what we call asymmetrical balance, and this is what balance is about. If you’re not careful about how you lay things out, the design will become unbalanced rather quickly. You can manipulate the visual weight of a design in many ways, such as with color, size and the addition or removal of elements. If you were to make the cross, say, a vibrant orange, it would become heavier and perhaps throw the layout off balance again. Achieving asymmetrical balance is an especially delicate matter that takes time to fine-tune and a somewhat trained eye to really pull off.

Here below is another example of symmetrical balance, this one by The First Twenty. Although the header graphic is asymmetrically balanced (can you spot how it’s done?), the rest of the design lower down has symmetrical columns. Asymmetrical balance might be harder to pull off, but it tends to make a design more playful.

You will find that every design you think looks good has a well-constructed balance underlying it. And every design featured here scores high on each of the seven principles we discuss. So take a minute to scroll up and down and see for yourself if they all pass muster.

2. Grid

The concept of grids is closely related to that of balance. Grids are a series of horizontal and vertical rulers that help you “compartmentalize” a design. Think of columns. Columns improve readability, making a page’s content easier to absorb. Spacing and the use of the Rule of Thirds (or similar Golden Ratio) make everything easier on the eye.

The Rule of Thirds and Golden Ratio account for why sidebars, for example, are usually about a third of the width of the page and why the main content area is roughly equal to the design’s width divided by 1.62 (equalling phi in mathematics). We won’t get into why this is, but it does seem to hold true in practice. It is also why the subject in professionally taken photographs is usually positioned not in the middle but at the intersection of an imaginary nine-square grid (three by three, with two horizontal and two vertical lines).

Example

While the design is not visually impressive in itself, the clear strict structuring of elements makes it easy on the eye. The left column is roughly twice the size of the right sidebar, which just makes sense and is something to think about when creating your own designs.

3. Color

What if you changed the base red on the The First Twenty website (above) to lime green? Would it look good? Most likely not. Because it does not belong to the same color palette (and of course lime green isn’t the easiest color to work with). Websites such as ColourLovers exist for a reason. You can’t just pick your colors Rambo-style, guns blazing. Some colors go well together, others don’t. A lot of theories on colors and their combinations exist, including conventions on monochrome and contrasting schemes, but a lot comes down to common sense and having a feel for it.

Find out for yourself what works together. Soak up as many website designs as possible, such as those featured on any of the many CSS showcase websites (like Best Web Gallery), to get a feel for how colors interact with each other. Pick two or three base colors at most for your design, and then use tints (which are lighter, mixed with white) and shades (which are darker, mixed with black) of these base colors to expand the palette where necessary.

Picking nice colors is as important as picking the right colors (that is, the right colors for the job). A Web design for a cozy little restaurant would do well with “earthy” tones: reds, browns, etc. Of course, there is no such thing as a surefire recipe. Every color sends out a message, and it is up to you to get the message right.

Example

Bence Kucsan’ Quommunication website has a color scheme style of his own. It’s mainly monochromatic (tints and shades of a single color) and achromatic (black and white) with a color (red) to stand out:

The black and white conveys chic and professional, while the red adds the spice that makes certain elements stand out and keeps the design from looking dull; of course, more than just red makes this design interesting. By the way, one company in particular popularized this style.

All of those soft pastels make this design shine. At first glance, the color choices may look somewhat arbitrary, but when you look closely you notice a strictly defined color palette, which is necessary to ensure that all of the elements get along well. The website, and especially its background, also demonstrates a good combination of colors and graphics, which brings us to number four…

4. Graphics

Okay, great design doesn’t need fancy graphics. But poor graphics will definitely hurt a design. Graphics add to the visual message. Websites like WebDesigner Wall have impressive illustrations, while others are understated.

Example

Tim van Damme uses only a handful of graphics on his website Max Voltar, but he implements them with the greatest thought and care. A non-intrusive background image and a sophisticated crown are two of the graphics. Visually, they are not overly impressive, but they all add to the look and feel of the website, and nowhere is one out of place.

For some time now, Max Voltar has had a different design than the one shown above. But for the two months that this one was online, it was easily one of my favorites. Because of this and because its use of graphics is so exemplary, I picked it over the lastest version.

Rogie King’s Komodo Media is a lot more graphics-heavy, perfectly executed from both a technical and thematic standpoint.

You may not be a great illustrator or photographer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t put great graphics on your website. Some basic Photoshop skill, possibly some stock images and great taste are all you need. Try to make the graphics go well together, and make sure they embody the style you are aiming for. We are not all gifted with the same natural ability, though. You can pick up some things by learning from others, but sometimes you just have to pick the style that suits you best (like a clean style if you are not the greatest of illustrators).

5. Typography

The art of type is a tricky subject to talk about because it encompasses so many elements. While it can be regarded as a branch of design, one can spend a lifetime mastering all of its aspects. This is not the place to provide a complete typographic reference, so we will limit our discussion to what will benefit you in the short term.

Web typography is handicapped compared to print typography. The biggest difference is our lack of complete control over the appearance of type on the Web, due to its dynamic character. Obviously, dynamic rendering has its strenghts, but Web designers have little control over the results, at least for now. Missing fonts on the user’s computer, differences in browser and platform rendering, and generally subpar support in CSS make Web typography a daunting if not frustrating task. But while we may have to wait for CSS 3 for Web typography to reach its full potential, we have the means now to make it look interesting and, more importantly, pretty.

Font Stacks

There are several fairly easy ways to significantly improve your website’s typography, three of which we’ll cover here. One of them is font stacks.

Font stacks are just basic CSS. They let you define the order in which fonts should be rendered. To be precise, we are speaking of typefaces here, not fonts. For a good summary on this, please refer to Jon Tan’s Typeface != Font.

body { font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; }

The property above will give the body copy the typeface of “Helvetica Neue.” This, however, requires that the user’s computer has that particular typeface installed. Macs nowadays come with Helvetica (Neue) pre-installed, but most Windows machines don’t.

The beauty of font stacks is that you can define “fallbacks,” meaning that whenever a defined typeface is missing, the browser simply looks for the next one in line. Of course, this means the design will not look exactly the same for everyone, and as such we lose some control yet again. But for those who do not want to resort to another solution (such as image replacement), this is the best that pure CSS offers at the moment (until the day we can comfortably use @font-face).

Wilson Miner uses the font stack we cited above. Helvetica Neue is an improvement of Helvetica. And while Arial is installed on almost every computer (at least on Windows and Mac machines) and therefore a popular choice for the Web, most designers prefer Helvetica to Arial. This way, you get the best of both worlds: Helvetica for those who have it and Arial in case Helvetica is unavailable.

Only a relatively small number of visitors will see the headers in Baskerville, but that is not a problem. It gives the design an extra bit of character while not hurting anyone who doesn’t have it. Again, font stacks are not a perfect solution, but they do give you an advantage.

Measure and Leading

Measure is the length of lines, and leading is the height (or vertical spacing) of lines. In CSS, measure can be controlled by defining a width for the containing box (e.g. the paragraph element). Both affect readability. If the lines are too short or too long, users won’t be comfortable reading the content; one often sees this problem with fluid layouts. Between 40 and 80 characters per line seems ideal.

Leading can be increased (or decreased, if you really want to) by defining the line-height CSS property. Generally, a line height of 1.5 works well for paragraphs. This means that when the size of the text is 12 points, the height of the line becomes 18 points (12 × 1.5), which gives the text some breathing room.

Hanging Quotes and Bullets

A third way to improve readability is with hanging quotes and bullets. Rather than leave the text of bulleted lists and quotes with the default alignment, horizontally align it with the rest of the text on the page.

We have added the red line to emphasize how all of the text has been horizontally aligned. By simply setting the padding-left CSS property of the bulleted list to 0, you can achieve the same result.

Pulling off hanging quotes, on the other hand, is not as straightforward. Most designers resort to a background image for quotation marks and then align accordingly, as done by Matthew Buchanan:

The hanging quotation mark here does not disrupt the flow of text. It’s a detail not often attended to but well worth the investment.

Print Rules That Do Not Apply

Print and Web are not the same. That seems pretty obvious, but a lot of people treat them as if they were the same. Print is fixed, and the Web is dynamic. Having complete control over how your Web design will look for everyone is impossible.

Vertical rhythm, proper justified text (with hyphenation and without rivers) and multi-column layouts are just a few of the features of print that are (almost) impossible on the Web. Thus, we have a lot to look forward to with CSS 3. CSS 3 will probably not be, however, a be-all and end-all solution, and it will likely be another few years before we can fully take advantage of it. We simply have to accept these differences for now: don’t look at the Web as an online version of print; rather, use the intrinsic potential of the Web to its fullest.

A Word About Image Replacement

What about image replacement (the technique of replacing fonts with images)? We’ve talked about font stacks, but aren’t they inferior to image replacement? Well, that depends on what you think is more important: being able to display the exact font you want or having dynamic, accessible and SEO-friendly content? Certain image replacement techniques have gotten pretty advanced, but they still aren’t as flexible as plain text. Image replacement lends itself well to headers and excerpts, but it is hardly a solution for body text.

6. White Space

White space, or negative space, has to do with what is not there. Like measure and leading, white space gives text some breathing room and spatial peace. You can make elements stand out by adding white space around them. Copy, for example, shouldn’t look cramped. To ensure readability, make sure paragraphs have sufficient padding.

Perfume ads — or any ad for a luxury product for that matter — are known for their use of white space… loads of it; and a serif typeface for good measure.

Example

I suppose it’s time for a shameless plug. The screenshot above is of my own website Shift (px). The design relies heavily on typography and white space. White space probably takes up about 50% of the page. White space is one of the easiest (because you aren’t really adding anything, are you?) and most effective ways to create a visually pleasing and readable design.

White space adds a lot of class to a design. Don’t be afraid to leave some holes open, even gaping ones. Inexperienced designers are tempted to put something in every little corner. Design is about communicating a message. Design elements, therefore, should support this message, not add noise to it.

Another good example of plenty of white space:

Kyle Meyer’s Astheria shows that not much is needed for a pleasing design. Some people may confuse “minimalist” with “simple.” But pulling off such a style is neither simple nor easy (even if one does not have to be great with graphics or illustrations).

7. Connection

“Connection” is a bit of a made-up term here, but it seems to be the best one for what we mean. Connection here refers to a Web design that has both unity and consistency. These two attributes demonstrate the profesionalism of a design (and thus its designer). They are very broad attributes. A design should be consistent in its use of colors, in its range of fonts, with its icons, etc. All of these aspects count; a design can look great and still suffer from inconsistencies.

When a design is inconsistent, its unity can be lost on the user. Unity is slightly different from consistency. Unity refers to how the different elements in a design interact and fit together. For example, do the colors and graphics match? Does everything contribute to one unified message? Consistency, on the other hand, is found between the pages of a design.

Unity is perhaps the more important of the two. Without unity, having a good design is hard. Inconsistency, however, may look a bit “sloppy” but may not make the design “bad.”

Of the seven principles addressed in this article, connection is the most important. Connection has to do with how all elements come together: balance, grid, colors, graphics, type and white space. It is sort of the glue that binds everything together. Without this glue, the design falls apart. You could have pretty type and a brilliant and meticulously chosen color palette, but if the graphics are awful or simply don’t match or if everything is crammed together without thought, the design will fail.

This is the hardest part of designing. It is not something that can be easily taught or necessarily be taught at all. A little natural ability and experience is required. But it is what it is, and it makes a design look good in the end.

Example

We praised Nick La’s WebDesigner Wall earlier because of its lovely graphics, but it is also a good example of connection. When you look closely at the graphics and the style in general, everything has a hand-drawn watercolor look to it: the articles’ images, the watercolored background images, the hand-drawn doodles and icons, the styling of the poll, and so on. The attention to detail makes this design excel.

Conclusion

Good Web design is not limited to the seven key principles discussed here. Aspects such as accessibility, readability and usability play a part, too.

This is the reason why Web design is so difficult. Getting your feet wet in design is easy, especially today, with so many content management systems, blogging tools and themes readily available. But truly mastering all of the facets of Web design takes time and, let’s be honest, talent. Having the ability to craft pretty designs is just one facet, but an important one.

About the Author

Juul Coolen is a computer science student living in The Netherlands who happens to love design. Besides developing and designing for the Web, he occasionally blogs on his personal website Shift (px) and tweets @juulcoolen.

From what I have read in this article the title is absolutely correct. It is an article about *design* princeples. However it should be noted that they should really substitute design for ‘teh pwetties’.

Now, if only designers can also comply to those pesky little things called standards, usability and proper design princeples, my job of turning your pretty unrealistic pictures into an actual website will be ten times easier.

And yes it is great for us designers that a lot of folks out there don’t know how to design great sites. Even when you expose the “mystery” I still don’t think they can do it with out professional help.

I love great typographic-based designs. I don’t know what it is about them, but great use of fonts really does it for me.

I’m not that clued up on good typography, but the best tip I ever picked up was to be careful when mixing serif and sans-serif. Personally, I generally use serif for headers, titles, etc and sans-serif for the main bodies of text. I think it creates a pleasant balance.

Graphics, on the other hand, is my thing! I’m not as good at designing them as I’d like to be, but I know how to use the components to put together a great site. I get a lot of stuff from http://www.ThemeForest.net and I have the collection from http://www.amazingwebgraphicscollection.com – I don’t think I’ve had to design anything from scratch in a long time!

Nice work, I especially like the part about print and web being different. I try to explain this to people all of the time. there are a lot of print designers who think that they can very easily design a website, but they don’t take things like changing content and consistent interfaces into account.

Unrelated: Is anyone else having the fonts on the site look very illegible(italic and very light weight). I’m using the latest version of Firefox (mac). Firebug says Helvetica Neue but it is way too light to be the normal weight. Everything looks fine in Safari, but not FF. Havn’t checked any other browsers.

I would be careful with specifying helvetica neue in your font stacks, as a print designer I have various weights activated, normally postscript versions, and that leads to them rendering like crap, especially in FF.

8. Put a whole wall of paneled advertising on your tech blog because it looks sooo great. Then use that as a platform to sound like you know what you’re talking about and pretend like it doesn’t cheapen your message.

Nice rundown of the principles. However, I notice that none of the examples have to deal with one real-world issue: ad placement. What do you do when 25% of the available window at any given time has content you cannot control in any way?

I definitely agree with you Mr. Coolen. These seven points are wonderfully explained as well as the way you have narrated them with examples is very good. Everything is easily understood and there is logic behind everything point too. Also agree to your conclusion that web designing is not that easy as it seems to be. Truly appreciate your article.

There one more that’s worth considering and that is, Target Audience. As they say, “Beauty is in eye of the beholder.” And IMHO all (except balance) of the above exist in the context of the beholders, no?

Also, do you consider UX as part of “good design”? We’ve all been on sites that look great but are inappropriate for the target and/or are not user friendly.

Beautiful article. I always felt there are two sides to any design. The art and the science. Few people can separate it. If we can, leave the art to a truly creative person and the science to any one who is interested in learning design with out being an artist.

This is the first post of this sort that I didn’t think was weighed down with unnecessary design dogma. Other than one of the examples (for “Unity”) that I felt was a less than optimal example, I think this post is spot-on. This should be shown to anyone endeavoring on designing a website for the first time.

Typography if easily the trickiest on for me. It’s amazing how the slightest variations in thickness or rounded corners can change the way a word looks or the reactions it sets off. It’s a very subtle art that takes a lot of focus.

Agree with everything you’ve written, and thanks for trying to educate about design discipline. There are some terrible websites out there, put together with no knowledge of the fundamentals of good graphic design.

I’ve always come to web design with the same set of rules, guidelines, principles (whatever you want to call them) as I would for a print design project. Everything described above is the basis of successful design, regardless of the medium.

Admittedly, there are some web-specific considerations, but just because the medium changes, we shouldn’t throw out the design rule-book, just adapt it accordingly.

I always find these lists difficult to write.
Top 10 Principles of UX Design
7 Top Design Priorities
Eleven Rules to Effective Site Design…..

I like your list of 7 things. But where do you talk about navigation excise, or human centered design (e.g., smart system messaging), or accessibility?

but instead of making the list longer, I propose making it shorter.

1) Connection. Design and use a rational design language system that accommodates both present needs and future design extensions.
2) Grid. Balance, typography, whitespace, and graphics are all subsets of the design and use of a well-architected grid.
3) Color. Easily the most subjective and most abused principle in most art/design projects. Also, probably the deepest rabbit hole where the final color doesn’t matter nearly so much as the system used to create your palette. Trends just ebb and flow too quickly (like typefaces) to recommend a color scheme. But the main principle here should be a system that is easy to manage in RGB (Hex, HSB), CMYK, and can adapt with little fanfare by using tints, shades, and duotones. Unless you’re a photographer and need to also manage Lab / 16-bit color within your design workflow you can eliminate that most delightful to use colorspace.

This post is exactly what I was looking for. Most of the posts I came across is talking about stuffs which are important but not directly related to web site designing, pro. Thankfully, I would be able to enhance my skills gradually by implementing few suggestions here as I missed on few previously, I guess. I am recently designing supplementary graphics for easymoneyschemes.com and want it to be near perfect and that is how I got in here. Learning curve is never ending and thanks to people, who never mind sharing their experience and knowledge.

Reading this i finally took a break from my job. I run a hardware store, and i get kinda stress throughout the day =) this site just bought me a few minutes of relax =] I managed to find a rss feed on your site, so that i could subscribe for some more. Ill be sure to come here more often from now on ^__^

This is perhaps one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, mostly because it’s targeted specifically to folks like myself: those who are technically sound but graphically impaired. My solid skills behind a camera translate not at all to good site design and layout, so I was really excited to look through this book when I first heard about it.

Beaird has written a very concise, gloriously illustrated work that does a tremendous job of covering everything from layout/composition to textures and color. Throughout the book Beaird uses real-world examples of sites that illustrate the particular point he’s working on. Sitepoint’s willingness to spring for full-color printing helps nail down Beaird’s content.

The book clearly discusses layout fundamentals like balance, grid theory, and symetry/asymetry. The chapter on color hits color psychology (“Feeling a bit blue today?”), palatte selection, and the value of using color wheels to pick complementary and contrasting colors.

The rest of the book is every bit as golden, hitting texture, typography, and imagery. There are a number of terrific resources for fonts, colors, and images with a mix between free and commercial resources.

This isn’t a book to find out the details of how blocks flow and clear in CSS, nor is it a book to learn about the latest and greatest in AJAX/Javascript. What this book does cover, and covers well, are the higher-level, vital concepts you need to grok before you start wiring up AJAX controls and laying out <div> elements.

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design isn’t just for lame design folks like myself. I imagine even accomplished web designers could learn a thing or two from it. It’s that good.

I couldn’t have really asked for a better blog. You’re ever present to present excellent advice, going directly to the point for straightforward understanding of your readers. You’re undoubtedly a terrific professional in this matter. Thanks a ton for remaining there for folks like me.

Very nice article.
I liked the point of having balanced. Using graphics & typography is good but must be well optimised.
Site loading time is also an essential part of a good web design.
Grid sytems are good.

This is the best article I’ve ever read on this subject. I’m not a professional web designer nor do I have a degree in arts. I’m a physicist that moved on to the computer science filed and eventually ended up developing a website. It is not hard to see why I had such a hard time trying to make it look nice. I’ve been searching to web for good information on principles that explain what we look at in a web design when we find it pretty. Since our assessment of beauty tends to be an automatic process I had never stopped and wonder about what specific details make a website look good. As a physicist I knew about the golden ratio but I lack the experience and education (and probably talent) needed understand what went wrong when I saw my own design and I didn’t like what I saw. This is definitely an art to me, but I’m glad I’ve found somebody who took the time to explain the basic principles that serve as guidelines. Thank you very much! (Sorry about my poor English. It is not my native language). Greetings!

Hello! I am from Ukrain and I dont speak english so gut, but I have homework to find the english text to read and translate it. So, I find this article and try to translate it. So, I want to tell “thank you” to the autor, because I find a lot of interesting information, that I can use for my website and develop my skills to make something beautiful! ^_^

Page Loading Speed is important aspect of website design these days, no visitor want to hang up for long if the page is taking time to load. Survey says that visitor will wait for 4 seconds maximum in most cases.

Hi there.people. Just remember that your website can only be as great as the content. Content matters lots and if you have nothing to offer, showoff or to interest the reader your pretty design goes bye bye in a matter of a minutes.

I’ve bumped into some of the ugliest websites on the planet and because their content is so delicious that those ugly websites have succeeded and are still here since the day http came online.

So for all those that think design is important don’t ever for get your content matters too. Even the way you writer needs to know how to entertain with great scripts or users hit the home button so fast you lost them.

This article is very insightful. I learned a lot reading it. I am doing research into web design and I am using this article as my main basis of research. The author should be proud of himself, it is written so well.

When you say that the Main Content area should be equal to the width of the page divided by 1.62, I’m a bit confused.

How does this work if you want to put more than the defined length in, then? In order for the area of the main content to equal page width divided by 1.62, then the main content space would have to be either wide and short or narrow and long.

Very good principals to take along with you when designing a website. Web designers tend to focus too much on graphics sometimes. I have to admit, I do so myself. But I have been thinking about text based sites and there appearance online.